We Should Have Seen This White Lotus Cameo Coming
In Sunday’s fifth episode of The White Lotus, season three, Rick (Walton Goggins) finally makes it to Bangkok where he may — or may not — attempt to kill hotel owner Sritala’s (Patravadi Mejudhon) husband, who he believes murdered his father when Rick was a kid. We don’t know much about Rick, a loner with few intimate associations other than his perpetually worried younger girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), but upon arriving in Bangkok, he reconnects with an old unnamed friend played by none other than Sam Rockwell.
While Rockwell’s appearance was a surprise to viewers, with his role otherwise unmentioned in the lead-up to the show, we maybe should have seen this coming by one telltale clue: Leslie Bibb. The two have been together since 2007, and rarely is one without the other. They met while shooting Iron Man 2 and worked together in the film Don Verdean. Rockwell had been conspicuously absent from Bibb’s behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram from her months shooting in Thailand, though maybe he was off filming something of his own. But knowing them and their love for each other, it was only a matter of time until he popped up.
Will Rockwell and Bibb appear in any scenes together? That seems far from likely: Bibb’s Kate is close to blowing a fuse alongside her bad, blonde friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon), and Rockwell’s unnamed associate is most likely just there to play wingman to whatever scheme Rick has cooked up. The point of their rendezvous is for Rockwell’s character to bring Rick a duffel bag with … something in there, but Rick asks his buddy to keep the next night open, too, just in case. In the interim, Rockwell’s character regales Rick with the story of his sobriety, a long-winded tale of misguided sexuality and binge drinking and dissociation. It’s rare that we see someone doing worse than Rick — maybe Jason Isaacs’s beleaguered Timothy — and Goggins’s face betrays a level of compassion and confusion we have yet to see from him. Can his friend’s sad story convince Rick that maybe his own issues are mostly internal, that enacting revenge won’t fulfill him the way he thinks it might? Sure, that’s probably the morally cathartic option, but that’s not why we come to The White Lotus.
So does this portend more celebrity-couple cameos? Mostly, that’s just us asking if Carrie Coon’s husband — actor and playwright Tracy Letts — might pop up on the horizon.
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